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Rockbox Replaces Archos Firmware
bagder writes: "The guys in the Rockbox project have just released the first working firmware replacement for the Archos portable hard disk-based MP3-players. The software is all GPL. Every tiny bit was reverse engineered, disassembled and then re-written from scratch. You can go download your own firmware right now!"
It thinks its an Ipod!
OOoh, maybe it can be added if the decoding hardware is generic enough? Wow.. that would ROCK!
Is that legal? I mean, I'd just hate to see something like that challenged under the DMCA in all its ridiculousness. Any thoughts or ideas?
Q17. I don't see you mentioning ogg files on your list of ideas. What about supporting those?
A17. At the current time we belive this is not very likely (though we are not completely closing out this possibility). The Micronas chip (MAS3507) decoder in the archos does not natively support ogg decoding and there is very little program space in the player to implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software decoder as part of the RockBox firmware. However, as much as we love our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is not fully sufficent for this need (Once again, this is not a definative no. The world is full of brilliant people. We just aren't hunting down all the ones not already involved with the project right this instant).
It may be reverse engineering, but unless I miss my guesse, that will not be a problem as far as the DMCA is concerned, as what was reverse engineered was not a means of retaining secure control of a media product. What was reverse engineered was the means of using a product that does not have access controls built into it.
There may be UCITA or EULA violations involved, however I don't expect that the people at Archos are interested in persuing that at this time. I personally don't think they want to be on the loosing side of a court battle over either EULA or UCITA.
Then again, IANAL.
-Rusty
You never know...
Are there any similar projects for the RioVolt SP250? It has upgradeable firmware as well. A quick Google search turned up nothing.
"If the creators of the Archos portable MP3 player had patented their design of the firmware, then the DMCA would protect them from others reverse engineering their product..."
The DMCA has nothing to do with patents. Besides, if they had patented the stuff there would be no need to reverse engineer. You could just read the patents.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Lots of other people have mentioned that they want Ogg support on their player and a few others have pointed out the FAQ answer that says it's probably too hard to do on this device. What I would like to see is a portable device that can be easily extended to arbitrary formats. For example, my current audio format of choice is FLAC which has no portable hardware support (though there apparently is a car player that supports it -- rock!). I doubt that it will become very popular though, because it's a lossless codec and therefore must take up more room than lossy codecs. But that's beside the point -- if someone makes a new audio format that is truly cool and does some things that certain people like or want, it would be neat if you could carry around that music without custom hardware.
Just a thought...
Yes, you can find the new firmware at the Diamond Multimedia FTP site. Its Version 2.00 BETA, with extra features such as a steroscope. Here's the link:
ftp://ftp.diamondmm.com/pub/rio/riovolt/sp250/
Download the "riovolt_sp250_200-firmware.exe" file (the firmware) and its corresonding text file (the readme explaining the new features). Note that in this version, some buttons will perform completely different actions than in the original firmware.
just tried the mod out, works great on my Studio 20, of course the UI has quite a bit till it's up to the current archos build, but it's good to see someone making progress.
the cool thing about these players it you don't have to actually flash the rom, they boot off of the internal rom for a second and immediately look for a file in the root for updates, if the file's not there they just continue to boot from hardware.
thats not really a similar project at all considering its done by the company that produces the hardware and not an independant third party group producing firmware for a commercial device they did not manufactor and sell
as the EULA is software and not hardware
EULA is End User License Agreement, anything can have a EULA
if you read all of the faq, not just the ogg part, they list several improvements to the ui they would like to improve
Actually if you understood elementary physics you'd not have asked that. The platters are gyros, the effect is not a twitch, but actually a slight resistance to being moved. They do, of course, 'twitch' very slightly when the power is turned on.
The real problem is that it's difficult to make the other parts move as close to those platters as they need to, without being so close they 'crash' into the platters when you bump something.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
no, yes.
The big deal is hopefully they can fix the bugs that archos is unable / unwilling to fix. And here is that bug: The damn think skips *all* the time ... even when it's stationary. Sometimes with CBR mp3's, but all the time with VBR mp3s. They have some workarounds, but they dont work, I know its not my player because all my friends who have one complain about the same damn thing. Other then that one HUGE problem its really a great little device
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
not really, they don't show any intention on adding functionality to play any format other than mp3.
Surely it cannot be both. Disassembly of proprietary code and rewriting same is not legal, is it?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I can't speak for the original poster, but I feel dirty when I have to use WMA instead of Ogg.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
From the FAQ (also on the main page):
Ok, forget about reality, what could we do with this?
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
The execs haven't slapped the DMCA on these guys yet, and I am glad for that. I think that we should start buying archos to fool around with. But if they do slap the DMCA around, I think that would be a call for a good ol' fashion boycott (or boston archos party :-). We need to stand up for our rights, and if they are denied, we need to fight back with the only weapon available to us, our own money.
What are you talking about?
I'm sure I'm going to look like the bad guy here... but can I point out that no one is going after anyone.
If they did post the inner (trade) secrets of the Archos players then the DMCA could apply, but only if Archos gets mad at them.
No need to worry, move along.
Don't get militant over nothing...
Get your Unix fortune now!
Slow down there big boy! Not a single one of those has actually been implemented! Calling this thing v1.0 is really misleading. These guys are like Microsoft, yeah, they got 1.0 out the door, call me when they get 3.11 for Workgroups, k?
They complain about the shuffle. Dandy, everyone knows that no matter how good an Archos product is, the shuffle is fucking ridiculous. Archos wouldn't know what random is if random bit them in the bloody ass. But Rockbox doesn't even have a shuffle feature yet! And if they do, it's not mentioned in the release notes or available via the menu.
I'm sure these guys will do something great with this project, but call me when they add even one of the features on that list.
[o]_O
I just hope the Archos legal dept. isn't friends with the people over at Blizzard, or they might just pull out that DMCA whore and trick it out. I smell another bnetd.
--
Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
if they can do it in 200k worth of code and still implement all of the rest of the standard features, they sure could. The device decodes mp3's in hardware, the firmware controls the software and UI, its most likely not possible to add decoders for other formats, a quick browsing of the faq at the rockbox site makes that pretty obvious.
You will have to look pretty hard for a jukbox6000, I don't think they are on the market any more. Check E-bay. Considering one of it's capabilities is a 6G USB hard drive, street value is proably under $200 now.
8 &cat=538&scat=539
My recollection is that I saw a Studio, or Recorder version with a 20G drive for approx $350 last month at either Micro Center, or CompUSA. BestBuy currently has the Archos Jukbox Recorder 20, listed at $319 (my purchase price was listed at $299 when I put it in my cart) URL is http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11101124&m=48
Prices apparently have come down. BestBuy also has the recorder in a 10G capacity, so you might find that workable instead. Price given for that is $259. Free shipping on all portable mp3 players.
Then again, I have relatives who either do or have worked for BestBuy. If you can find a better price somewhere else, and I think you probably can, go get it at the better price.
-Rusty
You never know...
Even if they posted trade secrets, the DMCA wouldn't apply. Other intellectual property laws would apply, but not the DMCA. To be clear, reverse engineering is still legal, except where the intent of the referse engineering is to circumvent a copy protection or content access management control mechanism. Sunce Archos has nothing to do with e-books, SDMI, or any other access rights mechanism, anyone bandying about DMCA violations needs to learn the difference between the law and the latest meme.
Kevin Fox
It is indeed true that Rockbox 1.0 lacks most of the feature every sane user wants. No one said it is more feature-complete or better in any way than the original firmware at this early point.
Still, this is a proof that our effort is going in the right direction, that it works and it helps getting attention and more developers onto the project. We meant the 1.0 release to be this.
Adding the missing features is now only a matter of time. If you join up, we'll have them available even faster.
I understand your frustration with how austere the features are now. Consider what they are trying to do, however. Their idea of 1.0 is to make it work, bug free, and at least play some mp3s. That in itself is a huge accomplishment. Sure 2.0 will be the version that everyone loves. 3.0 will have everything but the kitchen sink (and perhaps vorbis). I think we should commend what an accomplishment its been just to get this far. They just baked a cake, and now its time to frost/decorate it. They just cooked roast beef, now pour on the gravy. Pick your analogy, or suggest your own.
he's either karma whoring from moderators who don't understand this but figure it must be insightful, or he's trolling, ignore him.
As an Archos 20 owner I find this project immensely encouraging and hope that it will soon be in a position to make this Archos unit of mine desirable. As it stands, I hardly use the thing because it's so frustrating.
To quote from my epinions review:
"Reverse engineering is starting to take on a negative connotation, like "hacker" did. "
This is a good point. Most of science is 'reverse engineering' of the natural world. It'd be interesting if the scientist who supplied his own genetic material for the genome project turned around and sued the labs for reverce engineering him.
Kevin Fox
A bit better of a hack (loose use of a term, that) seems to be to download iriver's firmware instead, from here:
;)
http://www.iriverhk.com/English/downc.htm
This will revert a RioVolt SP-250 back to its roots by making it be an iRiver iMP-250.
IIRC, the menus are prettier, and there's a few extra options. I like the iRiver boot logo a bit better than Rio's. Also, the version number is higher -- iRiver distributes 2.2, whereas Rio is still at 2.0.
Kid-proof tablet..
An EU directive is not effective in a member state, until that state makes it a local law. Thus the European DMCA is not effective yet.
I'm sure these guys will do something great with this project, but call me when they add even one of the features on that list.
:
you dont get it do you?
this is Open Source. If you have ideas and help that you can bring to the party then bring them. What peopl *don't* need is some smart alec standing there watching and saying
"what's the point, it's rubbish, you're wasting my time!!"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
At first I was a bit sad that I owned the Creative DAP (Nomad) instead of this, but then I might have been turned off by these shortcomings.
Whenever these guys are ready with the basic functionality that should have been there in the first place, I'd suggest these features:
* HW-mod and SW to emulate various car CDchangers
* SID support (20GB of these babes)
Maybe the Creative Nomad Jukebox hacking project has made progress until then, but it's currently hacking the chip firmware itself and replacing that would probably leave you without a filesystem - the Archos project seems to have avoided that.
Why not help us?
Car CD changers are very simple to handle in software, but we naturally can't do the hardware ourselves since we don't have the head units.
SID support is perhaps possible. The main bottleneck is that we must encode the sound data as mp3 before feeding it to the sound chip. Unless, that is, someone manages to write a new DSP codec to play uncompressed PCM data.
The difference is that the purpose of the CSS scrambling is to prevent you from reading the files on the DVD and save them on another disk (or play them in an "unauthorized" player). CSS is thereby a copy protection scheme, which DMCA forbids circumventing.
The purpose of Archos' scrambling is obviously not to prevent copying, since the files are very much copyable, and Archos themselves freely distribute the files on the Internet. Thus, descrambling it does not circumvent a copy protection scheme.
That means it's a deterministic pseudorandom order, the exact opposite of "REAL random".
This is the exact difference between a hacker, which these guys obviously are, and a "developer". A hacker does something because it intrigues them. In many cases it doesn't need to be done, or doesn't benefit anyone (although I personally think this project does) but the hacker wants to learn and experiment.
This project is the very definition of hacker.
You just don't want it in your backpack if they go offline...
John
They reverse engineered a product. That's 100% legal.
What the DMCA makes illegal is reverse engineering mechanisms that either control copying or control access of copyrighted material for the sole purpose of circumventing that control.
Or if it simply has nothing to do with a copy control mechanism. Remember, reverse engineering is not illegal.
The DMCA deals with copy control mechanisms, DRM type stuff. Region coding & CSS, etc. Not software in general.
Reverse engineering softward and hardware is expressley allowed for any reason.
As for trade secret, you could be in shit for releasing trade secret information. If it's trade secret. A proprietary file format is NOT trade secret information, neither is a proprietary protocol.
Trade secret information is information they are protecting. Like the formula to Coca Cola.
But that reverse engineering for interoperability is tricky.
IF the DeCSS guys had a) reverse eingineered it and
b) produced a binary-only player
they could have claimed that it was for interoperability.
THis is one place where the DMCA is not compatable with open-source stuff.
I understand what you're trying to say, but my original understanding was v1.0 was "done". If they said, "yo check it, we got v0.1 and it works" then I would have been less angry. But I'm definitely feeling you.
There won't be any vorbis support because there isn't enough CPU power, but I'm looking forward to everything else.
[o]_O
You are correct that a non-repeating random play is not really random. Keeping track of the order songs have played in does not affect the randomness of it. I'm guessing that like my Iomega HipZip (which I don't recommend anyone buy), it will not remember the last song played on random mode.
I feel like my collection might be worth something in the future. It's not unreasonable that WMAs will eventually only be playable in WMP. MS leaned on WinAmp to disable the play-to-file feature for WMA files. When do they lean on them to stop playing them completely?
Besides, I tried some blind testing (recorded some samples, had a friend randomzie the order and play them to me) and I picked the CD and the Ogg, I complained that a ton of detail was lost in most of the sample, which turned out to be all the MP3s up to 256VBR, which was as high as I went.
Even the 56k Ogg kept most of the detail. At 112k the Ogg was undistinguishable from the CD in almost everything.
This was using a fairly decent sound card (SB Live, not great, but not as crap as some) and $90 ear buds that sound better than anything else I've ever owned, speaker, headphone, or otherwise.
So I have a real reason to use Ogg and I'd like to see the format be supported in such a way that makes it usable in the future.
The front-panel user interface is even worse. You can tell this thing was designed by the programmers. Even though it does what it needs, the designers seemed to choose the least obvious, most cumbersome route to each feature. The insanity of having to press right and left on the navigation disk to scroll up and down through the setup menus is just the beginning.
:)
That's funny.. I really like the interface. I can switch through things quickly without looking at the display. Course.. I am a programmer
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Keep in mind, Archos is the same company that did the following:
Somoene writes Linux drivers. They post a link on their web site so you can download them.
Someone puts up a web site detailing how to install a larger hard drive. The site states that such activity will void the warranty. Archos offers 10 and later 20 gig devices so you can have the larger capacity without voiding the warranty.
I'd be shocked if Archos cared if people were hacking their firmware. All it does is create a developer community and expanding uses for the hardware, which they are still selling.
If you want to mod an Archos, you still need to get a hold of one, which means buying it.
This is a win-win for Archos, unless some jackasses start calling Archos demanding tech support for the Open Source Firmware. Then it becomes a nuisance.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
You know, I'm really tired of people telling me 'The iPod already does that'.
It probably does. I don't know. But when I bought my Archos, there *was* no iPod. Further, while the Archos plays MP3s, it's also a general use portable disk drive. Add to that the fact that I can upgrade the internal drive to whatever the current laptop drive technology will hold and I've got a unit equal to the iPod. At least.
I only miss two things on my Archos: resume from a playlist and whole device shuffle mode.
Maybe the iPod is better. I really don't care. I own the Archos and while I'd like those two features, I'm not going to buy a new device for them.
So, the big deal is this: An open source OS has been created for a relatively inexpensive hard disk based MP3 player.
While that OS may not, as yet, be fully functional, given the history of like projects, I believe that this OS has the potential to be the *best* MP3 player on the market. If you aren't interested, that's fine. If you love your iPod, that's fine. But the Archos, at about $160 for a five gig player, is still an impressive product, and with a great OS, it'd be even better.
Sean.
What does the Archos Jukebox do that the iPod doesn't, besides being large?
1) It has a digital output for my home theatre system.
2) It records in real time. Recording from either a) its internal mic, b) analogue line-in/external mic, or c) digital input.
3) It offers many times the storage, and is upgradable. (Mine is 30gig, others have more). 10 gig is simply insufficient for many people's purposes.
4) It costs less.
5) It works in the field - you can take it camping, etc, because you can carry spare batteries for it if you're not going to have access to a powersource to recharge it.
6) Mac AND PC support.
It's as ugly as the ipod though (but I'm going to case-mod mine and fix that).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a year or two when the ipod (or its descendants) gets decent capacity and more features, that I'll buy one. The ipod is good, it's just not suited to me. Not yet, anyway.
True, sort of. The one thing I really don't like about the Archos line is the design of the battery compartments -- replacing the AA NiMHs is possible, but the covers and catches clearly aren't designed for doing so as a matter of routine use.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.